I'm curious to hear from others on this, as my own views have changed a lot since I built my first gaming PC 12 years ago:
How do you all feel about game modding and the lengths mod authors go to?
My most contentious, first question: Should mods be made to fix widely acknowledged flaws of game design or outright bugs? Does this veer into the territory of doing a developer's job for them, and tacitly encouraging the development of future titles to be lazy and incomplete? I'm still not sure if I have a firm answer here. On one hand, community patches and bug fixes almost always make for an objectively better gameplay experience. If something was just never working as intended, like broken quests, mechanics that don't work like they were supposed to, etc., I don't think most people will complain about a patch mod (unless it removes a useful exploit).
On the other hand, the practice makes me think of not only Bethesda's notorious laziness for polishing their games, but the broader industry practice of releasing something badly unfinished, making their money, and then maybe patching it into a decent state later, if they feel like it. Is modding away such problems worth the better gameplay experience, or does it just feed a vicious cycle, where we can never expect a complete-on-launch game from that developer again?
Like I said, I'm still not sure how I feel about that, since I conflict between being happy to have a more polished player experience, and being worried that this just encourages a developer to keep letting us do the polishing for them.
Probably a bit less contentious question: What about mods which alter gameplay that was already working as intended, but don't change the experience that much overall? I've actually made a couple of these myself, poking around the files of the original Mass Effect trilogy to reduce the lens flares coming off of every light source, especially in the third game, and another mod to do some other basic lighting changes. I feel this mostly falls under personal preference, similar to, say, one of the Skyrim mods that lets you turn your compass on and off with a hotkey. A simple change that opens up more player options for those who want them.
But even when making my own little lighting mods, I remember feeling a bit apprehensive about them. The mods to reduce the lens flares were well-received by a lot of people with visual impairments, since they said it was a lot less distracting with clearer light sources. So for them, it's great to have a better experience, but I wondered again if I was doing BioWare's work for them. Such a basic lighting change was simple for me to do in the game files, and it felt like something that really should have just been a toggle-able option under the graphics settings. But it wasn't. So I still felt a twinge of worry that this was the kind of thing that encourages rushed, unfinished releases with the knowledge that some player, somewhere, will probably take it on themselves to fix everything the developers didn't spend their own time on.
And hopefully the least contentious question: How do you all feel about mods that actually add something new, or otherwise alter gameplay enough that the experience could be called new? I personally love big overhaul mods like the massive Requiem mod for our near and dear Skyrim, Trooper Firefight for a complete rewrite of Halo's PvE coop experience, Mass Effect 3's Expanded Galaxy for entirely new missions, equipment, lots of new lore, etc. And I love to hear about others doing something similar, even when I don't get around to trying such a mod myself. Examples like Enderal for Skyrim come to mind, and maybe one day I'll finally try that one too.
But even these, that don't encourage a developer to be lazy, and are mostly just passion projects by fans who want to build off the game to make their own entirely new thing, have a potential problem: When they're applied to a game like Skyrim or the remastered Mass Effect, where community fixes are pretty much mandatory for a good experience, this makes the community modding tools also a requirement. And it can be overwhelming, committing time to a lengthy installation process while I'm looking with temptation at other games that just work right out of the box, and for which the most complex mods are usually as simple as backing up the original files, then dragging and dropping a modded file folder into the game directory.
It's really fun to play the end experience of something like Skyrim's Requiem or ME3's Expanded Galaxy, but when I have to install dedicated community-made software just to install them (and it's not as simple as clicking on an executable that comes with the individual mod, but a whole other program), these days my eyes start to glaze over. Skyrim is such a mess of coding that we pretty much all need to use the Nexus and one of the mod installers that can work with such files. Contrast with something like my recent time in Insurgency Source, or the Halo MCC, where I will regularly try out mods on a whim with a single button click in the Steam Workshop, and the only other waiting I do is for the files to download and install themselves. If I don't like them, there's no sense of time lost, since I can uninstall just as quickly and try something else. And if I do like them and keep them around, Steam will even install updates for them automatically, just like official updates for the game itself.
So even when some types of mods should be avoiding the pitfalls of encouraging game developers to continue overcharging their customers for unfinished games, I can still find a reason to be wary of the whole thing. Now, I'd love to hear from everyone else here. Maybe I've just gotten too jaded and tired of the game industry's general nonsense, and you think I'm inflating these issues in my mind. I'm sure the massive headache of learning to make my own mods, even as simple and quick as they were, probably isn't brightening my view of the whole situation.
Also, sorry this post is so long, but I had more to say on the topic than I thought I would. Anyway, share your thoughts! It's been too quiet in here lately.
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